Home › Our Susan's Opinion of a Kitchen › Graham Puffs
Graham Puffs
Mrs. O. S. Wheelock.
One pint of Graham flour, one egg, teaspoon salt, one tablespoon Cook's Friend baking powder; wet with milk or water.
A bare-bones quick bread of the gem-pan era: four ingredients, no oven temperature, no baking time and no indication of how thin the batter should be. The gaps are all fillable, but the liquid is the one you have to judge yourself.
- The batter is the hinge"Wet with milk or water" is the whole method, and it decides the result. For puffs baked in gem or muffin cups, aim for a batter that drops thickly from the spoon rather than pours — roughly 1 to 1 1/4 cups liquid to the pint of flour. Thinner batter gives a flatter, more pudding-like puff.
- A pint of flourDry goods were measured by volume, so this is two cups of graham flour, not a pound. Graham flour is coarse whole wheat with the bran and germ returned; modern stone-ground whole wheat is the closest substitute, and it drinks more liquid than white flour, so let the batter stand a minute before judging it.
- Cook's Friend baking powderA Canadian brand of the period. Any double-acting baking powder works; one tablespoon to two cups of flour is on the generous side by current practice, and 2 teaspoons will do without leaving a soapy note.
- Oven temperatureNone is given because the cook was expected to know. Gem batters want a hot oven — 425F — with the greased pan preheated so the batter sets fast and climbs. Figure 18 to 22 minutes.
- Gem pansPuffs of this kind were usually baked in a heavy cast-iron gem pan with deep oval cups, though the recipe names no vessel. A standard muffin tin is fine; cast iron, well greased and heated empty first, gets you closer to the crisp shell the name promises.
- YieldAbout 8 to 10 puffs. They are best within an hour of baking — with no sugar and almost no fat, they turn dry and dense by the next day.
The Home Cook Book was compiled in Toronto in the 1870s by "ladies of Toronto and chief cities and towns in Canada," with proceeds going to the Hospital for Sick Children, and it is stitched together from signed contributions like this one — which is why the instructions assume you already know how to bake. Graham flour takes its name from Sylvester Graham, the American temperance preacher and dietary reformer of the 1830s who argued that unbolted whole-meal bread was morally and physically superior to the fine white flour of commercial bakers. By the time this book appeared his crusade had cooled into a general middle-class conviction that coarse flour was wholesome, and graham gems, puffs and muffins turn up in nearly every North American community cookbook of the period. The Cook's Friend baking powder named here is a Canadian brand, and its appearance by name is a small reminder that these charity cookbooks circulated alongside the grocery trade rather than apart from it."}